Robert Wise, Film Director, Dies at 91

Published: September 15, 2005

Robert Wise, a conscientious craftsman in many movie genres who twice received Academy Awards as best director, died yesterday at the U.C.L.A. Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 91.

His death was confirmed by Lawrence Mirisch, a family friend.

Mr. Wise enjoyed a long career in which he became a notable editor of such films as Orson Welles's ''Citizen Kane,'' then made a successful transition from making B-movies at RKO Studios during Hollywood's golden era of the 1940's to making important films in the 1950's, 60's and 70's.

His career soared with ''West Side Story,'' the 1961 filming of the landmark Broadway musical, for which he shared an Oscar as best director with the choreographer Jerome Robbins. He received a second Academy Award as producer when the film was voted best picture. He gained his third and fourth Oscars with ''The Sound of Music,'' the lavish 1965 adaptation of the musical stage hit, in which he was again cited as best director and as producer of the best film.

In all, ''West Side Story'' received 10 Oscars and ''Sound of Music'' won 5. Mr. Wise also was honored at the Academy Awards ceremony in 1966 with the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for lifetime achievement as a producer.

Other films by Mr. Wise that continue to enjoy enthusiastic support include ''The Body Snatcher,'' a 1945 horror film with Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi; ''The Set-Up,'' a gritty 1949 study of second- rate boxers; and the 1951 science-fiction cult favorite ''The Day the Earth Stood Still.'' Mr. Wise counted among his own favorites ''The Haunting,'' a cult favorite from 1963 with Julie Harris and Claire Bloom, and the 1958 drama about capital punishment, ''I Want to Live!'' Mr. Wise considered himself a director of content, not messages, and he was not afraid to experiment. In 1959 he filmed ''Odds Against Tomorrow,'' an antiracist drama with Harry Belafonte and Robert Ryan about a brutal bank robbery that he made without the customary fades (going to black) or dissolves (overlapping scenes) to denote the passage of time. Fades and dissolves, he remarked, tend to slow the tempo and break the mood.

Despite Mr. Wise's versatility, dedication and skill at drawing consistently superior performances from actors, reviewers tended to complain that he left no personal stamp on his films. Detractors dismissed him as a sentimental technician whose movies were increasingly slick, uninventive and occasionally foolish.

Robert Earl Wise was born on Sept. 10, 1914, in Winchester, Ind., the son of a meatpacker and his wife. The Depression force him to quit college in 1933, and he headed for Hollywood, where his older brother, Dave, was an accountant at RKO. His brother helped him get a job as a messenger in the studio's editing department. Soon he was learning sound effects and music editing, and working his way up to film editing.

His work attracted the attention of Welles, who hired him to edit ''Citizen Kane.''

Mr. Wise and Welles had a falling out, however, over the fate of Welles's ''Magnificent Ambersons'' in 1942. Many filmgoers today regard that film as a masterpiece, but audiences hated it when it had its preview in Pomona, Calif. World War II had begun and Americans wanted escapist fare, not a tale about death and dying and a spinster's sexual frustration. Welles was in Brazil and a panicky RKO ordered that the overbudget, behind-schedule movie be recut and reshaped by others, including Mr. Wise. He and his assistant, Mark Robson, who would also go on to become a director, began working round the clock to cut, replace and transpose scene after scene in a frantic effort to ''keep the audiences in the theaters,'' as Mr. Wise put it.

Welles denounced the editing of ''The Magnificent Ambersons,'' saying the film was mutilated, ''cut by the studio gardener.'' Mr. Wise conceded that ''as a work of art'' the original Welles version was better, but he defended his editing as saving the film from a worse fate at the hands of the studio.

A particular admirer of Mr. Wise's editing was Martin Scorsese, the director who was instrumental in getting Mr. Wise the American Film Institute's life achievement award in 1998. ''His films became increasingly fascinating to me because of the editing style, a very crisp, clear style of editing that kind of points the audience toward where to look in a scene,'' Mr. Scorsese said.

Shortly after his work on ''The Magnificent Ambersons,'' Mr. Wise got a big break. Gunther von Fritsch fell behind schedule in directing ''The Curse of the Cat People,'' a children's terror fantasy that starred Simone Simon. Mr. Wise, who was editing it, was assigned to take over direction and completed shooting in 10 days. The film was hailed as one of the best of the psychological thrillers produced by Val Lewton and became a cult classic, and Mr. Wise was promoted to director. He believed that actors had a special language of their own and, with typical diligence, enrolled in an acting class to learn how performers viewed moviemaking.

For the next three decades he emerged as one of the most prolific and peripatetic filmmakers in Hollywood with films including ''Born to Kill'' (1947), ''Three Secrets'' (1950), ''The House on Telegraph Hill'' (1951), ''The Desert Rats'' (1953), ''Executive Suite'' (1954), ''Run Silent, Run Deep'' (1958), ''The Sand Pebbles'' (1966) and ''The Andromeda Strain'' (1971).

He had some memorable box-office flops as well, among them ''The Hindenburg'' (1975) and ''Star Trek: The Motion Picture'' (1979).

He is survived by his current wife, Millicent, of Los Angeles; a son from an earlier marriage, Robert E. Wise of California; a stepdaughter, Pamela Rosenberg of New York; and a granddaughter. His wife Patricia Doyle died in 1975.

In 1988 he received the highest honor of the Directors Guild of America, its D.W. Griffith Award for career achievement. He was a former chairman of the guild and a president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences who had the respect of many associates for striving to strike a balance between commerce and art, for professionalism and patience and for helping novice moviemakers.

When Mr. Wise was 83 he told The New York Times that ''Citizen Kane'' was not particularly difficult to edit, partly because of the masterly cinematography by Gregg Toland. From the outset, Mr. Wise said that he knew the film was singular. ''You would see those extraordinary dailies every day, the marvelous photography and angles and great scenes with actors that were new to the screen, you'd see this and know it was quite special,'' Mr. Wise said. ''And to think that Welles was 25, and it was his first film. Remarkable really.'' (The self-effacing Mr. Wise neglected to mention that he was less than a year older than Welles.)

Correction: October 4, 2005, Tuesday
An obituary of the film director Robert Wise in some late editions on Sept. 15 referred imprecisely to the reception of his 1979 movie ''Star Trek: The Motion Picture.'' Although it received disappointing reviews, it was a financial success, not a box-office flop.